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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Inconvenient truths for those that support cheap clean energy, and a price on carbon

I happened upon a very good article by Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker, concerning how the modern environmental movement is doing themselves no favors by removing carbon dioxide clean nuclear energy from the table. The authors do themselves no favors themselves though, by including a carbon tax into the solution mix with renewables.

As climate change skeptics and/or doubters have long known, the likes of Greenpeace, NRDC and Sierra Club recycle nothing more than anti-nuclear rhetoric. Many of these skeptics may take exception to the certainty of the predictions of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, but, they can be quite indifferent to using nuclear power as dispatchable and reliable electricity generation.

Greenpeace, NRDC, Sierra Club and many others of the Green Blob industry only push for a few electricity generation technologies: Wind Power, Solar Power, and Biomass Power.

While wind and solar are terribly expensive, without subsidies, Biomass Power is just silly if there is to be any sort of imaginary negative emissions in the carbon dioxide reduction cycle, but it is at least a baseload source.

Looking for examples of cheap energy with a carbon tax, one will be disappointed.

Germany is a great demonstration of renewables without nuclear and using coal at $350 per GigaWatt hour, While France is using over 80% nuclear and 15% renewable-like technologies is in at $190 per GigaWatt hour. Renewables will always drive the cost of electricity up. Why?

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

Well, you already know the answer to that one.

"You can not use taxes as a revenue generator AND a use deterrent at the same time"

So, in order to make solar and wind power costs lower, one taxes the carbon dioxide generators by $100/GW hour and subsidize the renewables down $100/GW hour and the consumer's electricity bill doubles.

Then, when they phase out all of the carbon dioxide generators, the consumer's bill goes back to triple or quadruple of what the price was before the carbon tax.

If one were to truly care about the environment and the energy impoverished, the choice is obvious.